We have made dying to ourselves so much about outward acts of denial when it must first begin with living to the Lord. Paul said in Romans that he who has been brought from death to life should not longer live his life for earthly pleasure but rather for the will of God. If we live we live to God and if we die we die to God. But the living and dying all begins with loving God and then the living comes as natural as breathing.
Living to God will automatically bring about dying to self. Jesus said if any man would come after me let him take up his cross and follow me. If we are ever going to live in the power of the resurrection we will certainly have to submit to the dying on the cross. The life of Jesus in the natural was in total contradiction to what God the Father wanted to accomplish through him, and so it will be with us. Jesus came that we might have life and have it more abundantly but it required Him surrendering to death. The cross I must bear in my own life will appear to totally contradict what it is God wants to accomplish through me. It wasn’t the cross itself that brought Jesus' exaltation by God the Father and subsequently the resurrection power, but his obedience to dying out of a heart of humility. Dying to ourselves isn’t what causes the power of Calvary to flow into our life, that is actually the consequence of our surrender and submission because we love not our lives unto death. The only way one can yield in reverent submission to dying is in first coming to the place of living for the one who has gone before us.
The petals of a rose emit the greatest fragrance only when crushed. If you smell a rose that is all in tact you will smell only a faint odor of the sweetness, but take that same rose and crush its petals and you will multiply its fragrance ten times. Often we are surrounded by people who can’t “see” but the fragrance of a rose can be spread abroad for miles.
Now thanks be to God who always leads us in triumph in Christ, and through us diffuses the fragrance of His knowledge in every place. For we are to God the fragrance of Christ among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing. 2 Corinthians 2:14-15
Disclaimer: For those who may happen to read any of my posts in which I talk about dying or death to self, I feel the need to explain that I am not referring to a "literal" physical death, but a similitude of dying to ones own way of doing and being that is motivated by selfishness that only Jesus can deliver us from.
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